I want to thank you both for taking the time to help me. I will look into both Champlain and UCF and see which fits me best. I have decided that I won't really pursue the graduate degree for another year or so just to get use to the new job/environment I will be in.
Champlain IMO is a very good program plus from everyone I ever spoke with involved at the school are very dedicated and so nice. Gary Kessler is a great contributor to the field.
SANS - you will probably here nothing but good things about them. Cost - no, it's not cheap, but when compared to other training paths (MCSE, Cisco) in IT it is very fair.
Certs are certs and they are what you make of them. I like them be cause I am so ADD at times that it makes me focus on a topic and set a certain goal.
OK so let me ask you question in return. You are at point A - you have your skill sets now - where is point B? Money aside - what would be your dream job in this field? Do you want to own a firm? Work for a bigger company? Teach? Research? Going to use baseball as I am watching the All Star game…what kind of player are you?
My dream job would be doing investigations for various cases that come up. Particularly in the government sector of some form. I'm sorry if this is too vague, I'm still learning. We can rule out teaching and primary researching (I say primary because I can assume I will do some form of research naturally.)
Purdue's got a good master's program in
If you haven't already, I'd check out the SANS GCIH certification. Forensics is a significant component of Incident Response, and in your current role you can probably swing towards IR responsibilities fairly easily (and maybe have work pay for it).
If IR is handled by another person or group, volunteer to help - most enterprises have ad-hoc IR teams made up of people from different groups.